Intuitive User Experiences for Enterprise Applications

Oracle WebCenter: Composite Applications & Mashups

Today, it’s pretty apparent that IT and the business work in
different cycles. IT focuses on
long-term stability, predictability, and cost reduction. Businesses tend to
respond to short-term opportunities and market shifts even as they plan for
long-term growth and profitability. Businesses like to respond; change,
therefore, is constant in business and it has often been difficult for IT to
change at the speed of business.What is
needed is a business-oriented approach for building solutions. One that is
flexible enough to change in near real-time as business and IT needs evolve.

One way to approach this is through composite applications
and mashups. By adding a flexible mashup layer on top of existing systems and
applications, the business is able to drive change. Processes and user
interfaces can be mashed-up on the fly by using readily available business
services, making it easy to quickly change these composite applications and
mashups within hours rather than days or weeks.

As you know a mashup is a combination of information (internal or
external) that is brought together to provide a valuable service.Many simple examples include combining
mapping information like home locations with list prices and sellers.In this way, I can get a quick view of all
the homes for sale in a specific neighborhood in which I want to live.I want the same service as a sales rep when I
go to decide how I will plan my week.I
want to see all my prospective customers within a certain area so that I can
plan accordingly.Or I want to combine
my current prospect s with a list of all the product issues they registered
over the last year so that I can make sure they are addressed before I
arrive.A mashup allows the business
user to quickly assemble this view from the different parts or sources supplied
from IT.

This week we want to focus on Composite
Applications and Mashups and I recently spoke with Sachin Agarwal,
Director of Product Management for WebCenter Portal at Oracle around this topic.
Here’s a summary of the insight Sachin provided.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Oracle WebCenter provides a rich set of
tools and capabilities for pulling in content, applications and collaboration
functionality from various different sources and weaving them together into what
we call Mashups. Mashups that also consists of transactional applications from
multiple sources are specifically called Composite Applications.

With Oracle WebCenter, one can develop highly productive
tasked based interfaces that aggregate a related set of applications that are
part of a business process and provide in context collaboration tools so that
users don’t have to navigate away to different tabs to achieve these tasks. For
instance, a call center representative (CSR), not only needs to be able to pull
customer information from a CRM application like Siebel, but also related
information from Oracle E-Business Suite about whether a specific order has shipped.
The CSR will be far more efficient if he or she does not have to open different
tabs to login into multiple applications while the customer is waiting, but can
access all this information in one mashup.

Oracle WebCenter provides a comprehensive set of tooling
that enables a business user to quickly aggregate together a mashup and wire-in
different backend applications to create a custom dashboard. Not only does
Oracle WebCenter supports a wide set of standards (WSRP 1.0, 2.0, JSR 168, JSR
286) that allow portletsfrom other
applications to be surfaced within WebCenter, but it also provides tools to
bring in other web applications such as .Net Applicationsas well as SharePoint webparts. The new
Business Mash-up editor allows business users to take any Oracle Application or
3rd party application and wire the backend data sources or APIs to a
rich set of visualizations and reuse them in mashups.Moreover, Business users can customize or
personalize any page using Oracle WebCenter Composer’s on-the-fly visual page
editing features. Users access and select different resource components
available in Oracle WebCenter’s Business Dictionary in order to add new content
to the page. The Business Dictionary provides a role-based view of available
components or resources, and these components can include information from a
variety of enterprise resources such as enterprise applications, managed
content, rich media, business processes, or business intelligence systems.
Together, Oracle WebCenter’s Composer and Business Dictionary give users access
to a powerful, yet easy to use, set of tools to personalize and extend their
Oracle WebCenter portals and applications without involving IT.

Looking for more information on Composite Applications and
Mashups? Check out these resources: